1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed in general to communications systems and methods for operating same, and more particularly to user equipment measurement procedures in a heterogeneous mobile network.
2. Description of the Related Art
In known wireless telecommunications systems, transmission equipment in a base station or access node/device transmits signals throughout a geographical region known as a cell. As technology has evolved, more advanced equipment has been introduced that can provide services that were not possible previously. This advanced equipment might include, for example, an E-UTRAN (evolved universal terrestrial radio access network) node B (eNB), a base station or other systems and devices. Such advanced or next generation equipment is often referred to as long-term evolution (LTE) equipment, and a packet-based network that uses such equipment is often referred to as an evolved packet system (EPS). An access device is any component, such as a traditional base station or an LTE eNB (Evolved Node B), that can provide a communication device, such as user equipment (UE) or mobile equipment (ME), with access to other components in a telecommunications system.
In mobile communication systems such as an E-UTRAN, the access device provides radio accesses to one or more communication devices. The access node/device comprises a packet scheduler for allocating uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) data transmission resources among all the UEs communicating to the access node/device. The functions of the scheduler include, among others, dividing the available air interface resources between the communication devices, deciding the resources (e.g. sub-carrier frequencies and timing) to be used for each packet data transmission, and monitoring packet allocation and system load. The scheduler allocates physical layer resources for physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) and physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) data transmissions, and sends scheduling information to the communication devices through a control channel, such as physical downlink control channel (PDCCH). The communication devices refer to the scheduling information for the timing, frequency, data block size, modulation and coding of uplink and downlink transmissions.